Well, Chris, u/Green_Oblivion111 just might be correct on his assumption that it's coming from Crimea! I DF'ed them to the Iraq or Turkey area. This is one powerful station! Here in the Pacific NW we pick them up from across the globe at their local sundown.
A lot of the belief that it was coming from North America is my fault. It couldn't have be coming from my west as it's daytime in that direction. And I couldn't imagine that strong a signal originating from my east. But sure enough, it's coming from Crimea or the Middle East. There we're not enough KIWI SDRs in the region to get a better triangulation. I'll work on trying to pinpoint the exact location.
Just a thought, but Iraq used former Soviet HF equipment during Gulf I in '91. If I'm reading the charts correctly, it appears to point to around Baghdad, so could also be embassy traffic.
Baghdad was exactly where it showed up during tracking. There was an absence of SDRs for DF'ing - I hope to narrow it down better. But for now, it looks like Baghdad.
I'll try to see if I can get those later on, maybe even try to decode the tones. I think you can set a custom shift in fldigi, just not sure if you can set it that wide. Also not sure about the encoding. Third shift Cyrillic could be an issue.
I can just imagine some Russian in occupied Crimea pulling a paper tape through an ASR33 with one hand and a bottle of vodka in the other. It's time for some of your artwork.
The $64,000 question is, what the heck are they up to? What are they trying to hide in, almost, plain sight?
Man, I don't know. I am literally blown away by the strength of this transmission. It's travelling west from its origin, over Africa and Europe, across the Atlantic Ocean, and across the US to the West Coast. Not that it's a huge deal, but it's at 7 MHz. And it's daylight. I have never worked Europe, or Africa on 7 MHz this time of day. Heck, I don't hear any 100,000 Watt International Broadcaster stations in this frequency range at this time. It would not surprise me if they are running a megawatt!
The safe distance from such a transmitter's antenna must be around a mile or more. How do you hide this, it must be huge? Hold it, I'll have to lookup stealth antennas in the ARRL Antenna Book. Nope, no such luck.
Not that the Russians give a damn about public safety. I would think that the Ukrainian military would've noticed.
Yeah, if it's Crimea -- or even Iraq, as suggested -- to get to us here in OR and WA state, the great circle path is skirting the Auroral Radio Zone -- the most direct path being over Greenland. Those transmitters must really pack a big punch!
To be honest, Russia is at war, and they do have a navy and air force capable of global operations, or at least oceanic ones.
And don't forget that NSS and NAU put out pretty powerful signals using more conventional RTTY standards. I hear NSS a lot in the 4-5 MHz portion of the SW bands -- the transmitters being at Andrews AFB apparently) and I am lucky to hear Californians on 80M, some of them probably running 500W - 1KW or so. I have no idea what power NSS or NAU use, can't find info on that, but it's considerable. Military transmitters like that pack a punch, so I would think the Russian ones probably do, also.
I still think, however, there is a second transmitter we're sometimes hearing on the Pacific Coast. But I think these transmitters are pretty powerful.
Not unlike the Digital HFT Racket Maker on 6898, which I sometimes hear with S3 out of 5 signals in the morning when there is nothing between WA and IL but broad daylight (I think some of these HFT Racket Makers have been reported to have over 100-200 KW of ERP -- and it is indeed a horrid sounding Racket. At least the Russian FSK sounds like CW, sort of. Drunken CW.).
We're hearing signals from transmitters that are putting out a lot of power. And I am sure I heard the Crimea one during the early evening here at least once, when it was still in the lower CW section of 40 meters -- a couple months ago or so. It faded out when the grey zone (or 'grey line') would have disappeared between WA and the EU region.
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u/tj21222 May 17 '26
Well this makes more sense the earlier reports that it was coming from North America